


Wolf or Die

by amo-amas-amat (amoama)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoama/pseuds/amo-amas-amat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victoria's life is in the balance and she doesn't know whether she wants to live or die. Hunting is in her blood, but now her blood is being turned against her. AHHHHHHHHH MAMA!ARGENT FIC AHHHHH. </p>
<p>Spoilers up to 2.8.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolf or Die

**Author's Note:**

> Grateful kisses to lilithilien for getting this ship-shape!

_Victoria curses her wounds. Everything she ever knew or believed falls away from her in the instant she feels the sharp rip of teeth on her flesh. She doesn’t even know what to hope for now; suddenly she’s at war with herself, and uncertainty of purpose has never been something she allows._

_She looks into her husband’s eyes. She doesn’t know. The panic builds in her. She doesn’t know. Is she begging for death or life? Chris looks at her in horror and despair. This is worse than death. Her whole body burns and she wills it into hate, for all the werewolves but for this pack above all, this reconstitution of Hales. Scott McCall. With Derek._

_She drifts in and out of consciousness. Her life, her purpose, her family; everything hangs in the balance. She’s the leader, a commander of hunters; how could she let it get to this?_

Killing Scott was supposed to be easy. Child’s play. One lowly, lovesick Omega who was already terrified of her. Hadn’t he sweat buckets in the school office just last week? She’d had him in her power and she’d _toyed_ with him, even indulging in a little castration fantasy, because she could. She probably didn’t even really hate him. He was just a weak, stupid, fanged-puppy undeserving of her daughter. She’d thought.

_Instead Scott has a pack, the strength of which she knows better than to underestimate. She despises it, even as she feels it seeping into her. There’s no defense against the mark of an Alpha, the ties of the pack. It’s like family._

Victoria had never believed Derek Hale was much of a threat. She would never have allowed him to live so long otherwise. His recruits seemed just as pitiful. Tame, broken, easily manipulated. Hadn’t Kate proven that?

_But Kate was always a liability, Victoria thought bitterly._

Callous and careless of the rules, Kate played at hunting like it was a game, one with cruel stakes, where flouting the rules just meant you got to the end quicker. 

_Even here, at the end, Victoria is relieved that the crazy bitch is gone for good. She’s not around to claim leadership in Victoria’s wake._

Hunting was not a game, not like that. If you flouted the rules, you changed the playing field; and you couldn’t win if you didn’t know what game you were playing. Within the rules was the only way to play. Victoria has always believed that with her whole soul. _She thinks she still does._

Argents have been hunting werewolves for generations. Victoria had been proud to ally with them. They’re good and they’re respected, even if they’ve always worked too independently. That was Victoria’s mother’s opinion before her marriage to Chris. They needed her.

Victoria is hunting royalty. The Srebro side of the family had been killing werewolves in Serbia in the 1200s. Her blood has hunted for century upon century all over the globe. With Gerard’s wife long dead and Kate Argent too young and too wild, Victoria took her place at the head of the Argent family at the behest of her own mother. Her mother was worried about Gerard’s leadership, despite their respect for him, the hunting community whispered about his bitter vendetta against all wolves, not to protect humanity, but to subjugate the abominations. Victoria feels the same rage, the same desires, after all she’s witnessed, but she refuses to let them own her.

It had been a good match. Christopher Argent was not his father’s son, he had far more interest in retaining his own humanity - all that he feared his father had lost. Chris was a soldier first, brave but not blood-thirsty without consideration. Victoria had been worried by his reticence at first, and questioned his allegiances. (There had been rumors.) But her mother counseled that these were the very qualities that would complement Victoria’s own exacting standards. So the marriage had gone ahead, Srebro became Argent, ancient Serbian and French families, in unity in California against their common enemy. And Chris had proved malleable, even agreeable. He took a sly pleasure in her command over his father as she quietly, slowly, limited his power, bringing the Argents back in line. Gerard knew better than to flaunt her authority outright and generally preferred to stay outside of her jurisdiction.

Those first years, Chris learnt every word of the Hunter’s Code as they lay in their marriage bed. Every sub-clause and every footnote yielded a reward from her. One hand at his neck, the other at the base of his cock. He had known it before, as all hunters do, but now she bound him to it, so every syllable of it was associated with a different pleasure. So he knew, as she did, the glory and fruitfulness of playing by the rules.

If he found her love-making strange, he took it in his stride, one eyebrow raised and a small, half-amused shrug. Her husband was a man who knew how to choose his battles and knew that submitting to his wife’s small perversities was the surest way to get what they both wanted. Chris Argent was all she could have wished for in a lieutenant – almost too much so, because it was years before she realized she loved him for all the other things he was as well.

She lost him completely the day Allison was born. She hadn’t realized she would miss him so much or that she had had so much to lose. They both knew, if the baby was a girl, there would be only one child. An Argent-Srebro female to cement their families’ allegiances - to ensure Kate could never take power - was all that was necessary. In the vast terror of the first trimester Victoria voiced her fears into the darkness of their bedroom, revealing her distaste at the very thought of motherhood. Chris took her to mean she worried she wouldn’t be a good mother, but Victoria was more concerned that motherhood would strip her of her focus, change her priorities and lessen her resolve to do everything she needed to. Leadership means sacrifice beyond merely dying for the cause. She’s always believed that is why the Code-writers chose their women for this role. 

Every lumbering step of pregnancy rattled Victoria, like she was on the back-foot in a fight and too slow to recover. Not that she complained. In fact, she barely spoke at all for the final three months as she focused solely on her determination to produce this child, strong and healthy. When Allison arrived, Victoria was proud and relieved. The girl was tough. She sucked Victoria’s breast with her teeth and Victoria felt the pain and was reassured that her child would be the heir she needed.

It was Chris that spoilt her, softened her. Victoria doesn’t remember her father, and her mother was fierce and furious every second of the day. Victoria watched her husband and her daughter cuddle and play and fight, but she mostly saw it from the outside. _Yes,_ Victoria remembers thinking, _that looks good, that looks normal._

Victoria was raised in the truth of what her family was, what she would be. The battle with Chris over what to tell Allison, and when, was the first one Victoria lost to him. He beat her with the Code which turns over training of young hunters, even female hunters, to the soldiers first. To lead hunters you must know your craft from the bottom up. Chris claimed autonomy for his training methods. He took Allison to parks and woodlands and open ranges and he taught her to shoot arrows, schooled her in all the different techniques, with every bow available. He taught her the types of guns and rifles they had, but he refused to let her wield them, and he refused to tell her the truth.

Victoria lost him to her daughter, just as fully as she won him from his father. They still went through the motions; perhaps they became even more in sync as they had to think less and less about how they negotiated around each other. They still found comfort and release in each other’s bodies, and the scratch of his stubbled-beard between her shoulder blades in the night still made her feel safer than she could admit in daylight. But she saw the Code betraying her for the first time and she resented it more than she thought would be possible. She had to try hard not to let it turn into resentment for her daughter.

Chris was young again with Allison, fun-loving in a way Victoria had never seen him, in a way that maybe he had never got to be as a child. Knowing what was out there was what stopped you from being a kid. Once you knew, once you’d seen, the world was a different place. Ignorance and innocence were closely intertwined in this. Gerard loved the hunt too much to protect his children from it. Victoria learnt the truth all too well, all too quickly. Five years old and her father torn apart limb by limb. Most days all she remembered was the red of the eyes and tattoos that cris-crossed the hairless parts of the wolf’s face and chest. Feral and merciless. Victoria was never a child after that.

She has carried her father’s knife every day since. It was not for protection but a reminder. The steel and the sharpness, clean and graceful and deadly. All things she treasured above a childhood. She watched Allison experience a different life in wonder, almost paralyzed by the normality of it. After a few years she started to take part in it. It was almost easy because it was what people (other, outside, non-hunting people) seemed to expect of her. She baked cookies for parties and pot roasts for dinners, she attended PTA meetings and voiced opinions on sex education and the reading curriculum. She had a small side-career buying jewelry as well as being a “housewife” because it was San Francisco and it was expected of an educated white mother who might otherwise be bored at home apparently. She told Allison she looked pretty and put plasters on grazed knees and corrected math homework with a sharp red pen. It was a life she never thought she’d have that Chris gave her, so she tried not to resent it and waited patiently in the background for the day when she would be able to claim her daughter as her own.

_She opens her eyes again. The pain that courses through her is unbearable. Her body cannot fight it any longer. Stumbling out to Chris was all she could do. Now her body only holds out to give her mind the chance to catch up. She’s so unfinished. Furious at fate and at all the loose ends she’s leaving as she lies here dying, turning. How can she come so close to securing her legacy and have it stolen from her now? Victoria doesn’t know how to give up or let go. Hunters do not get taught things that could only shame the Code._

_She looks into her husband’s eyes, brimming with heartbreak and disbelief. In their own ways they’ve always been working for the same things: to protect, defend, uphold. She could have chosen to break with him, to give him up for soft, but she liked that he wasn’t as cruel as her. She saw it as an old nobility, the true heart of the Code, to be preserved against the ruthless choices this world foisted upon those who would lead._

_Here at the end, as he holds her, she finds she regrets having to leave him. And not just because she must leave him to battle with his father over Allison’s future, the future of all hunters. She regrets leaving him for his own sake. It wasn’t Chris in the end who stole her daughter and she won’t blame him for it now._

Scott McCall was a problem from the start. A threat to her entire family, their way of life. Allison is their next leader and you can’t lead if you have divided loyalties. Victoria hasn’t had her chance to shape her daughter yet. One day soon the soldiers would have been done teaching her and Allison would be turned over to her. Victoria has been fantasizing about it, longing for someone to share her knowledge with. Allison learns quickly; Victoria has watched her study, given her harder and harder problems and puzzles, approved of her lively mind determinedly solving what’s in front of her. Allison doesn’t know it but she already knows the smell of every wolf’s bane plant - the one game Victoria knew how to play with her daughter - in their garden testing each other on smells and names. All that’s left is to reveal to Allison their true properties, their most lethal dosages. Victoria never wanted a child, but she has longed for a daughter.

Victoria has watched Scott jealously; he wiled his way into Allison’s life so quickly that Victoria missed her chance to stop it before it began. He’s there now, a fixed entity apparently. Blind and clueless, crashing around _her_ world. She tried to feel sorry for him. An innocent boy ruined by the bite, she has seen he hates parts of it, but not all of it, _not enough_. Victoria worried that even Chris might not be able to hold Allison back from this boy. She regrets letting him have her daughter for so long. Everything about Allison’s feelings for the wolf seemed childish and beneath her. Now they will have to work hard to reclaim her for the Argents. And Victoria won’t be there to do it. 

_She draws in another shaky breath, making sure she can still do it. Breathing - aren’t you supposed to be able to take that for granted? Even pushing the blood round her body seems to hurt and she feels so far away from the man holding her. How often has she lain in his arms? Why do they seem so unfamiliar suddenly?_

_Even as she feels the bite festering in her shoulder, Victoria wills Chris to understand her. Use it, she thinks, this new tragedy perpetrated on Allison’s family by the wolf pack. Kate’s death, this bite. The Argent women are being targeted for destruction. If Victoria survives this, she’ll be a monster, bound to her enemy. The Alpha could force her to turn on her own family. Her husband could be forced to kill her. No child can survive that. Who knows what Allison will be after that? Use it, Victoria thinks, as the black pain clouds her eyes, a last, desperate strategy to salvage a small victory from her destruction. The pain is so great that she can’t even look into her husband’s eyes once more, not even to beg for death. Even if it’s not the Code. Even if she doesn’t kill. If their roles were reversed, it’s what she’d do, she thinks he knows that. She’d end him, and call it a mercy, but it’s possible she did her job too well, that the Code is too much a part of him. She doesn’t know what to hope for._


End file.
